So far we have Old, Middle, Early Modern, and Modern English. What linguistic rules govern at what point we will have "moved on to the next phase"? Is there a conveniently defined amount of change — say, a vowel shift, a new case or tense, borrowing of 42,000+ words from Chinese or Klingon — that would automatically indicate to a linguist that he's looking at a new language form that deserves its own term?

Or is it as prosaic as "some future linguist proposes a new term/classification whenever he sees fit, and it is either embraced by other linguists or not"?

It's just that it's bothering me — and I'm not sure how this is related at all to the previous question, but anyhow — it's bothering me that when that new form of English arrives, the term Modern English, referring to the language we speak today, will start causing problems.

I mean, I suppose Old English, Middle English, and even Early Modern English will still make sense ten thousand years down the line; in fact, we can probably keep them forever. The term Modern English, on the other hand, will most certainly become misleading as time passes.

I was at an Model UN conference and often notes like the following get passed. As I'm not a native speaker, I assume that this has to do with some pronunciational issue. Can you please explain what's so funny about this sentence? (Djibouti seemed to be often used in such context.)
If Bangkok ...

My favorite UI horror is how Outlook will fail to warn you that your password for the Exchange server needs to be changed. You just suddenly notice that all your mail is 3 days old and you're not getting anything new.

I stumbled on this because of the use of -able as far as turning nouns into adjectives. I'm aware that normally -able should be attached only to verbs... but I submit to you:
palatable
Hmm. I've been chewing on this for a bit and the only thing I can come up with is perhaps a backformation from...

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Hello everyone. I'm a complete newbie on this website, so I apologize in advance if this question is off-topic (even though I did read — well, skim — the FAQ, I'm still not sure).
I'm Russian and so is my first language, but I'm a big English enthusiast. For a long time now, I've been practicing...

Oh well. I think (I think!) the key part is this: "but I would really want to learn to also speak several British accents as perfectly as possible". Which would make it a "how to improve my English" question.